Pages

Saturday, 30 August 2014

Friday, 29 August 2014

Seems like gold is an ongoing theme here at out little house here these days! Here are some pictures from our hallway after we added some storage. You could say this post is a sequel to this one, actually. The rest of this small space is still a bit of a mess, but since this is the first wall you see when I come down the stairs in the morning and when I come home after work, I'm glad at least this looks happy and organized... A mail sorting system, a picture rail and two coat hooks, and now this wall actually have some function. The doormat got a new rounded shape with the help of a knife and Cricket seems to approve. And what's better than another place to showcase the dahlias from the garden?

Thursday, 28 August 2014

I was tidying up in a bookshelf just now and found another old diary. I've created a "snapshot" from the first apartment me and A shared, a student apartment close to our campus in Gothenburg. It had a bedroom, bathroom, a study and a open plan living-room/"kitchen". These where the times of the "fat" TV and when we stilled listened to CD's...

Thinking back I can't believe it's been 10 years just around now that we have lived together, in four different homes. Good times!

Wednesday, 27 August 2014

Today I've been to the vet with Cricket. We have been trying to figure out what to do about her chronic problems with inflamed gums for a long time now, and the last time we had her in for a proper check with blood-test and x-rays and so on the outlook wasn't so great. She's generally healthy, but her gums and her teeth doesn't seem to function well together. The plan was to put her on antibiotics for two weeks and if that didn't help the next step was to pull her teeth out... All of them except her front teeth and her canines.

Tough. I don't want to do it. But I don't want her to hurt.

So. Today the two weeks were up and we went back for a check-up. And it looked better! Not good, but there was an improvement! So now we'll give her another two weeks of antibiotics, then wait for two more weeks to see if it'll hold and the we decide.... Here's to my sweet Cricket and her little fangs! Cross your fingers and paws!

Sunday, 24 August 2014

Me and A have been thinking about taking up kayaking a bit more frequently ever since a friend of ours told us about the great club they have right here in the city center and how you can borrow kayaks from them if you just become a member and take the introduction course. They also have weekly trips and longer outings every now and then. After our kayaking in Croatia over the summer we became even more sure that this was something we wanted top become a part of back home.
When we booked our sea kayak introduction course a while back Stavanger was still enjoying the best summer in years... safe to say we have left that behind us now. But all in all, it was a great course, in between being cold as h*ll I picked up some new skills on how to rescue a buddy or how to get back up in a capsized kayak. Learning this means we had to spend a lot of time in the water but I guess it was worth it. Now that i'm dry and warm again I think so.

Wednesday, 20 August 2014

I know it's still August, but here it feel so much like fall it might as well be October. I still have some hope there might come a few more summer-like days again, but you never know. I would like to get a sunny afternoon someday soon so I can go out there and clean up a bit, maybe rescue some plants that could move inside before fall and tie a couple of the bigger plants and bushes up after all stormy nights we've had lately. I haven't really been outside much since I started working, and the garden is now looking a bit overgrown, overblown and wind-blown.

Monday, 18 August 2014

I think it's fair to say that autumn has come to Stavanger. At least it doesn't feel like summer at all any longer. I packed away my summer clothes this weekend, which means most of my more colorful dresses, tops and skirts. I was pretty much bored with them anyway so it felt like a good thing. Today I sported a completely colorless outfit that wasn't very visionary at all, but that ended up feeling quite fancy since I wore pretty shoes. Pretty shoes help. And today's wind and rain called for a tweed jacket. Business above, party below?

Saturday, 16 August 2014

I have mentions several times here on the blog that cooking isn't really my thing. But I like to eat so every once in a while I have to do it. My strategy when it comes to cooking is to 1. simple is best, and 2. while your at it - why not cook for the entire week so you don't have to do it again?

Now that both A and I are back at work and both of us are more busy in the evenings I really like to have something in the freezer that I can just pop in the micro-wave when A eats dinner at work. So on Thursday I had my food preparation day, making two big loads of soup, hummus, plus both breakfast muffins and some smoothie packages so that I'll easily can get back in to good breakfast routines again. There was a lot of bowls and cutting boards in the kitchen at the same time, and the trick is to keep the different project separated, so you don't end up with chili in you muffins or banana in your soup. If you don't like that kind of thing, of course. It took two hours, but that included cleaning the kitchen, and now I have so much food in the freezer nothing more will fit in there. I store the soup in plastic bags, one portions in each. It takes up less space and they are easy to defrost.

The soups I made was this one with broccoli and sweet-potato, and this spicy one - but I only had tofu in it, no shrimp.

The breakfast muffins I did this time bacically only included oatmeal, some nuts, egg, baking powder, apple-sauce and banana. They turned out really moist and tasty!

Thursday, 14 August 2014

Found some old artwork of mine when I visited my Mom this summer, and had a sudden insight: Three years old - that's when I peaked...

This is just a few examples. I was a way more creative child than I am as adult! Look at the carefree strokes, the bold use of color, the imagery! Maybe I should go back to the same themes as I preferred then, dreaming animals, ambulances and princesses...

We've been doing a bit of a furniture shuffle here in the house over the summer. A couple of new pieces have moved in and some other have been forces to find new homes within our home. I'm not all done with this project that turned out larger than I anticipated, even though the changes in themselves have been kind of small. The plan was to add more practical storage and at the same time update, clean out and get rid of some stuff that hid in all of these cabinets and drawers in our tiny house.

Anyway. One of the places that got a "new" piece of furniture was the up-stair hallway, in the corner that is the first thing that you see when you walk up the stairs. This is Hugo's spot, and he used to lay on top of the small drawer-unit that stood here before, but it had the wrong dimensions and always felt a bit out of place. As we bought some new stuff for the downstairs hallway we moved this bright turquoise piece from there upstairs and it works so much better. Hugo doesn't seem to mind, actually I think he prefers it since he now has more space to sprawl on.

I decorated with some candle-holders and a vase in the same color-family as the drawer-unit but when it came to the artwork I wanted something more neutral as a contrast, so i chose a painting with a Gothenburg-motif that I'm borrowing from my dad. It still has some details that picks up the green-blue so I think it work great. And the frame matches Hugo's fur perfectly...

The weather turned here in Stavanger pretty much the same day I started working. Which suits me fine, I don't mind bad weather when I'm at work, but it have sort of put an end on my enthusiasm about being in the garden. Maybe it'll come back if the sun shows up again, but so far I'm just enjoying taking some of the many flowers I've grown this year indoors. Particularly the sweet-pea that smells amazing!

Monday, 11 August 2014

I don't remember the actual date we moved here, but it was in the beginning of August 2009, which means that we celebrate five years in Norway these days! I wouldn't have thought about it hadn't it been for the fact that A came home with a bouquet of flowers from his work, congratulating him on working there for five years. That's a nice gesture!

Some days I can't believe it has been this long, and some days it feels like I lived here forever. Here's what it looked like the first weeks when we had moved here, still living in a hotel because the container of our stuff hadn't arrived and we did't have the keys to our apartment:

I took a year off from working as an architect after leaving my job in Sweden, and decided to study art- and architecture history at the University of Stavanger. That was a great decision, but I felt a bit old compared to the other first year students...

We moved in to our nice and airy apartment on the tiny island Grasholmen a bridge away from the city center.

I was blond and has short hair. Odd.

I met T & E for the first time at a BBQ!

And I hung out with some other exchange students, mostly four nurse-students from Canada. They made me realize I like Canadians. Here we are on a hike.

Well, hello there!

This is a diary, of sorts, written by me, Annika, architect turned graphic design student. I spent my first 26 years in Sweden, the following 7 in Norway and now I live with my husband and two cats in Brunei, on the tropical island Borneo. Read my blog if you - like me - are fond of traveling, dressing up, reading fantasy, watching loads of Netflix, looking at cats, dancing Lindy hop and eating candy. Occasionally I get creative and, well, create stuff. When that happens I'll most likely blog about it. Welcome!